Timeshare presentations are either a great way to save money on a vacation or a horrible nightmare. Some people love them, others hate them. Everyone should experience them at least once but the problem here is that this could blow up in your face if you don’t handle things the right way. This article will walk you through what a timeshare is, what to expect during a presentation, why you should go to as many as possible, why people buy timeshares, why you shouldn’t, and how to survive the presentation.
What’s a timeshare?
Traditionally, a timeshare involved buying a set week a certain resort/hotel. Wouldn’t it be nice to own a vacation condo in a resort area? Yeah, but who has money for that. Also, why buy a place and pay for it all year when you are only going to use it once or twice a year? Timeshares were the solution for that. For a much lower price, you paid for just the time you wanted to use. Other people paid for the weeks they wanted to use. By splitting the cost of the condo amongst dozens of other people, it was much easier for more people to achieve their dream of vacation ownership.
Of course, that’s how it was pitched but in reality, it didn’t work out so well for most people. Maintenace fees add up and unlike traditional real estate, there’s next to no resale market. With contracts that are near impossible to get out of, that fun vacation often turned into a total nightmare. Timeshares got a horrible reputation. Even South Park did an episode about timeshares once. It’s a great episode.
The industry needed to change and it did. Instead of offering this traditional one room, one week set up, the industry moved to be more flexible. While some programs might be different, most now have a points system. You purchase a set number of points and then those points will allow you to book a wide variety of hotels in many different locations. This added flexibility eliminates the problem of being stuck going to the same place, at the same time every year. So while these are now pitched as vacation ownership programs, the term timeshare is still used by most people.
So why are they bad?
There are countless articles online about why these are bad so I won’t go too far into it here but these things are very, very profitable to the companies that sell them. If something is very, very profitable for the seller, it’s a bad deal for the buyer. Simply put, you are locking yourself into an expensive program. You not only have to pay up front, you have to pay fees each year. Since these programs are so expensive, most buyers will finance them. That involves even more fees. The value of these points may also change over time.
If you need further evidence that timeshares are bad, consider the following: 1) anything that requires high pressure sales tactics should not be purchased. If it was that good, it would sell itself. 2) Many people will sell their timeshare contracts for $1. Many owners are desperate to dump their timeshare. 3) There’s a huge timeshare cancellation industry that has also been called a scam. If this was so good, so many people would not be paying to get out of them.
Why bother doing a presenation then?
Prizes and cheap trips! Virtually no one walks into a presentation thinking “I’m going to buy a timeshare today!”. They go in thinking, “I’ll give up 2 hours for a cheap trip, points, gift card or some other prize. I’ll just tell them no”. This kind of goes back to my last point. Can you think of anything else that requires a bribe and a 2 hour sales pitch to purchase? I certainly can’t. While there are all different deals for timeshares, the best ones involve cheap vacations. We stayed on the Strip in Vegas for 3 nights for $199. No resort fees. On top of that, we got 100,000 Hilton points. Those will allow us to get free nights at other hotels. Other presentations involve getting $250 in gift cards or resort credit. 2 hours to save hundreds of dollars, if not more is a pretty good deal.
What to expect during the presentation
These all fluctuate a little bit depending on where you are. I’ll go over two of the most common ones I’ve seen. The first is where you check in and you may have to fill out a form. You’ll then meet your sales person. That person will escort you to a room where you’ll be given a presentation that could involve a video. This person is there to get you dreaming about all the places that you could go. It will also cover a lot of the common objections people may have about timeshares. In fact, they may even tell you that this is not a timeshare. So besides dreaming about where to go, it will also help lower your defenses.
When you’re done with that, you’re salesperson will bring you to a desk and tell you more about the program. They’ll try to sell you on the program. You’re expected to say no at least once if not a few times. During this conversation, they are learning about you so that they can tailor their pitch to you. It’s kind of like a cold reading that a medium does. They’ll get you to say things and then they’ll bring that back up in a different context a few minutes later. For example, they may ask you about dream trips and if you say Barbados, 15 minutes later they’ll talk about places you can travel to in the Caribbean such as…Barbados. They won’t remind you that you mentioned that and you’ll probably forget that you said it. This is done so that you can say “oh wow, I’ve always wanted to go to Barbados, tell me more”. Now they got you.
There are YouTube videos you can watch where the salespeople are trained to lie to you. Are you a dog person? They have a dog. Hate dogs? They do too. But it goes beyond just little white lies. They will tell you whatever you want to hear. Whatever objection you have, they’ll have an answer and quite often, it’s just BS. Are there blackout dates? Even if there are, they’ll say no. Think up any possible problem with this program and they’ll tell you, by looking right in your eyes, that the problem you are concerned with isn’t an issue at all, even if it is. In fact, it’s the most perfect program ever. There’s literally no downside. These people are the best of the best. They are highly trained and they’ve heard it all. They make a living by selling people nonsense when they never thought that they were gonna buy anything. That’s why some states allow you to get out of a contract within a certain amount of time. If you live in one of those states, you may actually get rejected from going to a presentation. Now if this was so great, why would they be so concerned with that?
Before I continue with the first type of presentation, I’m going to skip to the second type since they end the same. In this type, you’ll be with your salesperson the entire time. It’ll just be you two and them. I should have mentioned that if you’re married, they require your spouse to be there. This is to avoid the “let me talk to my spouse” objection. Your salesperson may take you to breakfast first. This might seem weird but its designed to establish rapport and trust. It’s also designed to pick your brain to gather intel that they will later use against you. See my Barbados example above. Once breakfast is over, you’ll be brought back to the desk and the presentation will largely be the same. The concern here is that breakfast plus the standard presentation may go beyond the allotted time. More on that later.
Regardless of which type of presentation you attend (and perhaps there’s others) the end result is the same. You either say yes or no. If you say no to everything, they then step away to speak to their manager. Whether this person is actually the manager or not is irrelevant. This person is called “the closer”. It’s one off the best salespeople there. Their job is get you to yes no matter what and they have a high success rate. This is where the pressure gets turned up. It’s the worst part of the presentation really. Once again, you either say yes or no. If you say no, they won’t be happy but you’ll still get your prize. If you say yes, there will be a huge celebration and they will do something to draw attention to you such a ring a bell. This is done to not only reward you for making this choice but to also demonstrate to other people that you said yes. From start to finish, there’s a ton of psychology at work here.
How to survive the presentation
Just knowing how this all works and what to expect will help you tremendously. They want you to sign right there instead of thinking about it, researching or talking it over because they know that almost everyone that walks away will realize that this is a bad deal. Most people go into this rather blind and everything from the video presentation to the salesperson to the closer is set up to knock down your defenses and convince you that this is an opportunity of a lifetime. And trust me, it will definitely seem like an opportunity of a lifetime. You might even second guess everything I’m telling you because it all sounds so good but remember, it’s not. It just sounds like it. That is where people get in trouble.
A lot of people will recommend that you “just say no”. While technically correct, that’s not the best advice. First, most people go in with that attitude and as I just said, the entire presentation is set up to knock down that defense. Almost everyone that bought into one of these programs went into it with the “just say no” mindset. So while some people can do that, there’s plenty of people that can’t. Instead of just playing defense, I suggest going on offense.
The first thing you need to do is to confirm the terms of your participation. How long is this and when does it start? This is normally not too much of an issue with the first type of presentation but with the second type, that breakfast is not always counted. Regardless, you should not do anything with anyone unless you can confirm that the time starts now. I don’t suggest doing that with the check in person if there is one. That usually just takes a few minutes. But from the first time you encounter your salesperson, confirm the time, that it starts now and when it will end. I would suggest starting a timer right then. Whether you tell them that you did that is up to you.
If there’s a presentation at the beginning, just sit through that. Once your salesperson meets with you and starts asking you questions, this is where you need to start with the offense. I realize some people hate to lie but you have to understand that this person is going to lie to you in an effort to get a ton of money out of you. As a result, I don’t think you should feel bad. You could say that you have an RV and that it costs a lot of money so you just use that to travel. You have zero interest going anywhere else and you really don’t like planes. This makes you a really bad prospect and most salespeople will not even bother trying to sell you. It’ll make for a much easier presentation. I’ve actually had some really nice conversations with these people once they knew that they could just be a normal person.
For those of you that are into travel hacking, you could just tell them up front that you use points to travel so a program like this wouldn’t be useful. I’ve tried this a few times and most have agreed that I wouldn’t benefit from their program although one guy said that “this is just like points”. I had to politely explain that its not like points at all since points are free.
Regardless of what you come up with, you have to break it out fairly early but it should be natural. They’ll ask you a ton of questions such as “where was your last trip”, “when is your next trip”, “what’s your favorite place to travel to”, “what’s your dream trip”, etc. Again, these are all questions that will be used later in the sales pitch. This is where you have to apply your offense. If you’re going with the RV story or something similar, all of the questions should be “we just want to use our RV”. I don’t care what the question is, the answer should come back to that. If you’re going with points, just focus on that. You let the points and availability decide where and when you’re going to go. No matter what your story is, the end result is that you’re not the average person that has vacation goals, dreams and favorite spots. As a result, you’ll be a bad prospect and they’ll want to move on to the next person.
Sometimes there is a Hail Mary pitch that they will throw out at the end. Instead of signing up for this big expensive program, you can pay a much smaller amount to just try out the program once with no further commitment. Hey that sounds good right? No. Just no. Nothing these people selling is good.
If you do this the right way, they may cut you loose early. Even if they don’t, the presentation will likely be pretty easy as I said before. An easy presentation makes this so much more pleasant. As a result, it won’t be such a turn off to do in the future. The worst thing that can happen is to have a bad experience to ruin your trip and/or turn you off from doing other presentations.
Regardless of how the presentation is going, you need to monitor the time and advise the salesperson when there’s about 15 minutes left. This will allow them to get the closer. Once the time is up, politely cut them off and advise that you have fulfilled your commitment. Thank them for their time and ask how to get your prize. However, in my experience, I’ve never had to do this because I had a good offense.
But wait, I know someone that likes their timeshare
I’m sure if you interviewed 10,000 people that stuck a fork in an electric socket, at least a few people would say that it was a good idea. Doesn’t mean that they’re correct. As the old saying goes, “a broken clock is right twice a day”. Confirmation bias gets a lot of people in trouble. Most people don’t want to admit that they made a mistake. Other people may not understand yet that they made a horrible choice. After all, not everyone is good at math. I’ve had a few people claim that this was a good decision for them, but no one has ever showed me the math. I suppose anything is possible but I think you’ll win the lottery before you wind up in a position where any type of timeshare makes sense for you.
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